I Should Have Stayed Home and Washed My Hair
by Talipatra
Summary: Bella's too nice to say no and it leads to a horrific and scarring "date" night with Mike. Rated M for language and slight sexual suggestion. A one-shot collaboration between Talipatra and ktdcee.


**Ktdcee A/N**: So, real life story. Decided it was nearly much too amazing to keep to myself and with the help of the always wonderful Talipatra we decided to collaborate, embellish a bit and turn it in to a quick one-shot for you all to chuckle at.  
We've both posted the story, and we'd both love to have feedback on it, so feel free to drop a review onto both of our postings of the story! We love hearing from you!

Big thank you to **Stratan** my beta for doing a quick edit for us, such a standup fella!

**Tali**: When ktdcee told me this story the first time, I nearly peed my pants laughing. I told her it should be a one-shot and here we are! Enjoy and let us know what you think! Thanks Stratan!

***

I'll admit it, I was creeping on people's Facebook pages-don't turn up your nose and go all righteous and above it all, because we all do it, no trying and denying it. Just as I was about to get off, I heard that annoying noise signaling a message from someone. I ran through my options quickly; shut the cover to the laptop quickly and fake innocence, or start and finish a quick conversation. To this day, I will regret choosing the latter option.

**Mike:** hey girl, what's good?  
**Bella: **Hey Mike, um, nothing. Just finishing some stuff for classes, you?  
**Mike: **righteous.  
**Mike:** nuthin much.  
**Mike:** so when we hangin' out?  
**Bella:** Um, sometime soon for sure!  
**Mike: **what are u doing on Friday?  
**Bella:** Working… the same shift as you, Mike.  
**Mike:** got any plans for after work?  
**Bella: **Nothing as of right now. Why?  
**Mike:** well let's do sumthin together after  
**Mike:** we can head back to my place and watch a movie or something  
**Bella:** Sure Mike, that sounds good, I'll see you Friday! Got to finish some stuff! Night!  
**Mike:** night hun

I quickly shut off my laptop, and prayed to God that something would come up so I could politely cancel with an excellent excuse.

***

I shivered in the early January wind as I moved quickly towards the car. Mike ran beside me, his long strides practically double mine. He got to my car and turned around, grinning at me.

"I win."

I rolled my eyes as I moved around the car, slipping slightly in the ice and slush on the ground. His loud guffaws sliced through the cold air, assaulting my ears like a duck attacks a piece of bread in a pond. I grimaced and unlocked the door, letting us both in.

He immediately reached forward and flipped through the radio stations, grumbling about the "shit" I was playing.

"I happen to like Kings of Leon," I announced, pulling out into traffic and starting the drive towards his house.

"Whatever, Dream Theater kicks ass."

"Who the fuck is Dream Theater?" I asked, glancing at the clock. You know the night isn't going well when you're ten minutes into it and already wondering how much longer.

Mike. Why the fuck was I wasting my time with him? He wasn't a guy I'd ever consider in a romantic way so that was out. Hell, I didn't even really consider him that great of a friend. He was just… there. And he wanted to hang out. Since I couldn't come up with a decent enough excuse, here I was, apparently listening to him complain about his job. I missed when we moved on from music to work, but apparently I'd been making the appropriate grunts and noises because he didn't seem to realize that I wasn't listening. As I was tuning back in, I heard him say:

"I swear, that guy jacks off at _least_ once a day at his desk, maybe more. He's such a fuck up."

I grimaced at that mental image. I didn't even need to know who he was talking about to be horrified. I'd seen the guys he worked with, and Mike was the office stud, as awful as that was.

He yammered on for the entire twenty minute drive to his house. I was slowly starting to lose my already short temper. Far be it from him to, you know, be a fucking friend and ask me how _my_ day went. No no, it's cool. I enjoy having old ladies spit in my hand. I LOVE being attacked by a psychotic monkey in a cat carrier. The day is not complete without some asshole calling me jailbait. Newsflash! I'm nineteen! Fuckers.

"Hey, you mind pulling into the little variety store there? I just need to grab something real quick." I nodded my head and turned into the tiny parking lot, parking my car near the building. Mike proceeded to jump out of the barely stopped car and sprint towards the door.

"Gee, Mike! I'm fine, don't worry about asking if I need anything." I muttered sarcastically, as I pulled out my cell phone and scrolled through my contacts, hitting send when I landed on Emily.

"Hey, so um, it's been roughly, fifteen minutes and it's already horrid!" I cried into the phone as I heard Emily laugh on the other end.

"Oh come on, you sound a little melodramatic! I mean like you said, it's only been fifteen minutes since you picked him up. How bad could it really be?" She asked, and I bit my tongue to keep from it rolling back into my throat and choking me.

"Listen here woman! You are to text me twice at 8:50 pm, and then call at 9:00 pm, and explain to me that something came up and I need to come get you!" I told her and listened as she agreed. I looked up through the store windows to see Mike headed back in the direction towards the exit. "Hey I think he's coming back! I need to run! Don't forget me!" I told her as I shut my phone and sat it back in my cup holder as Mike emerged from the store with none other than a thirty pack of beer. Lovely.

I pulled up in front of his house and grimaced internally. This house was where the American dream came to die. Really, it was probably already dead when it took up residence. It looked like a house you'd see in the Appalachian Mountains with inbred hicks with two teeth sitting on the porch playing the banjo and telling you "you have a purty mouth." I immediately wanted to run screaming into the night. And I'm not a runner. More like a walk carefully away at a high rate of speed… er.

We climbed out of the car and I did a mental check, trying to remember when was the last time I had a tetanus shot. Probably not recently enough. I'd likely need one after tonight.

"Oh, just to let you know, my dad's probably home. He likes to get drunk off his ass on Friday nights."

"Oh. Um… awesome?"

"Yeah, it was pretty cool before I was old enough to buy my own beer. I'd just scam some of his." He offered me a huge grin like he was the first teenager to think of that. Hell, I was a "good girl" and I'd done that. Sometimes having divorced parents was nice. Just tell one the other let me do something and bam, I got to do it there, too.

I followed him up the steps, holding on tightly to the handrail so I wouldn't slip on the stairs which were all iced over. Mike just plodded along ahead of me, still talking. What he was talking about I had no idea.

He paused in front of the door and jammed a key in the lock, pushing it open and heading in ahead of me.

Now, I'm as liberated as the next girl, but still, it wouldn't kill him to hold the door for me. It was freezing cold outside, and I'm a guest. I was lucky he didn't let the door smack me in the face.

What did smack me in the face was a wall of cigarette smoke. I felt like I could chew the air it was so thick.

_Emily better damn not forget me_ I thought as I tried not to hack up a lung.

From somewhere in the haze I heard a man's voice shout, "Hey bitch!"

I hesitated before taking a deep breath, coughing and entering the apartment when Mike finally acknowledged my presence and invited me in.

"Hey pops! None of that, there's a lady present!" Mike admonished his father with the most ridiculous grin on his face. _What the fuck are you playing at, Newton?_

"I know that, I was calling you the 'bitch' Michael." His father rebutted before taking another puff of his cigarette and turning his attention back on the music program he was watching on the television.

"Dad, ain't you going to introduce yourself?" Even though I'm all for manners and the people that hold them, I really had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing when his father looked from Mike to me and point blank told me:

"I'm his father," before turning his attention back to the program.

"Your name, dad! I told her you were my fucking dad!" Mike said before turning in my direction and telling me his father's name is 'Kevin'.

"Alright, you can hang tight in here while I take a shower quickly. Dad will go in the other room," he told me, winking and heading off and leaving me on my own.

I looked around the room I'd been left in, deciding against taking off my coat and instead hugging it closer to my chest. It was a small, dark room. To the left was a room with a blaring TV where Kevin was watching whatever the hell it was he was watching. To the right was a short hallway that led to parts unknown. A window was located across from me, over the back of a couch, and it looked like it had seen better days… days probably about thirty years ago. I studied the window contemplatively.

_How far up is that window from the ground outside over there? Can I make a run for it?  
_Answer: Fuck my life.

I carefully sat down in the corner of the couch and tried my hardest to turn my body in on itself so that I didn't touch too much of the surface area of the couch. As I looked around the room, I noticed their cat sitting on the back of the couch. I clucked to the cat and patted my thigh and watched as it gingerly padded its way towards me.

"You poor little guy." I told the cat as I rubbed its head and looked up to see Mike's dad had entered the living room. I smiled politely and continued patting the cat's head before looking up at him. He smirked and started across the room towards what I suspected was the kitchen.

"Hey bitch!" He cried as he crossed the room. As he re-entered with two cans of beer he looked back in my general direction again. "Hey bitch! I'm talking about the cat." He giggled shamelessly as he exited the room, and I couldn't help but stare in hideous amazement at the man who had just left the room.

"Drunk on off his ass on Fridays…" I muttered to myself and the cat, "that man is a fucking award winning drunk," the cat meowed, obviously agreeing with my observations.

"At least someone in this house…" I trailed off, my train of thought immediately derailed when Mike sauntered into the room in nothing but a towel. A thin towel that was way too short. No girl should have to see that much of Mike's pasty white thighs _ever._

_Oh sweet baby Jesus. _I stared at him in shock, my jaw dropping slightly as he stood there in feigned nonchalance.

"I know, impressive, right?" he grinned, and struck an Atlas pose, one leg in front, bent at a right angle, his bicep flexed, fist on forehead.

"Uh… sure?" It really was a question. I'd never been subjected to a half naked man with a… holy god was that a tattoo of a bulldog in the middle of his back? Who gets a tattoo in the middle of their back anyway?

"Oh, you noticed my tats. Nice, right?" he turned around, flexing again so the muscles in his back rippled slightly. My jaw dropped the rest of the way at "Newton" scrawled across his shoulder blades in old English. Classy with a capital K.

"Is that a dog?"

"Yeah, isn't it awesome? His name is Jake."

"You… named your tattoo dog."

"Yeah. Watch, when I flex, he barks."

He did something that caused the muscles in his back to move. The dog didn't look like he was barking, more like he was throwing up. I jumped, though, when Mike let out a decidedly Chihuahua-esque yip.

I bit back a laugh. "Wow."

"Yeah, awesome, huh?"

"Well, I didn't exactly see it…"

"Oh, let me do it again."

He kept flexing and yipping until I thought I was going to pee my pants or explode from keeping the laughter in. I finally claimed to see it, if for no other reason than to get him to stop and go put some clothes on.

"Awesome, huh?"

"Totally," I said sarcastically. He missed that fact and just winked, and then sauntered back into the back area of the house.

"Seriously, you can't carry clothes into the bathroom to get dressed?" I grumbled under my breath to the cat. He looked up at my sympathetically. "You've probably seen him naked huh?" The cat blinked sadly. I scratched his ears and he closed his eyes, leaning into my hand. Poor thing was probably scarred for life.

A few minutes after emerging from behind closed doors, fully clothed – thankfully – Mike made a pit stop at the fridge for a beer and had whimsically produced three scratch tickets from… his ass? I don't know.

Gee Champ, thanks for asking if I was thirsty or would have liked anything.

"Put on whatever you want to watch, Bells." He told me as he cracked open the can and took a sip.

"That's the good stuff," he muttered with a smile before putting on the end table and starting his scratch ticket fest.

If I learned one thing from Charlie Swan, it was that there was a social hierarchy when it came to beer choice. Mike was extremely low on the totem pole.

I turned my attention back to the television and started flipping through the channels, finally landing on an episode of Bones.

"This okay?" I asked as Mike, drastically tore himself from his busy work and looked up at the screen.

"No, not really, I hate this show. Here give me the remote," he said, as he held out his hand expectantly. _Whatever you want to watch, Bells_, continued to ring through my mind as the bit of patience and calm I had built up during the shower period was now slowly evading me.

He ended up flipping on some basketball game, and then laid down the remote and continued sipping from his drink and scratching away at the scratch tickets.

I stared at him intently, wondering how many times he was dropped on his fucking head as a baby, but then gave up when I figured the number would be too high for me to even fathom. I was surprised when he stopped scratching for a moment and looked up in my direction before winking and continuing his scratching again.

After another few minutes, he laid down the scratch ticket, claiming it's a loser.

"Let me finish scratching these, and then you'll have my undivided attention!" he announced to me with a wink that looked painful.

So far, he's one scratch ticket down after five minutes, and even though they're the interactive kind with crossword puzzles and fucking riddles to finding Noah's Ark or the Holy Grail, or some shit, I'm fully wondering if he's slightly retarded.

I watched as he started the next one, his tongue sticking out in the corner of his mouth. Apparently, this was incredibly difficult to do and required the kind of concentration usually reserved for space missions and brain surgery.

Just then, someone pounded on the front door before just bursting in, shouting "WRESTLEMANIA!" I jumped, startled and more than a little scared of the intruder. Mike, however, seemed unfazed. He looked up and nodded at the large man carrying a six pack of Diet Coke that was missing two cans. He didn't even look at us as he made his way into the mysterious other area of the house where Mike's dad was. I heard more shouting about wrestling, and then the TV station switched and I could hear announcements from some kind of wrestling show.

"Who the fuck was that?" I asked in a low voice, afraid Cletus would hear me and come back, making some kind of inappropriate comment that seemed to come naturally to the inhabitants of this house.

"My uncle. He comes over and watches wrestling with Dad on Fridays."

I nodded, at a loss for words. What the fuck were the people in this family smoking when they procreated? It was obvious why there were multiple generations of them: no one had the intelligence God gave a snail, so they couldn't be trusted to use birth control. It would probably kill brain cells trying to figure out how to put a condom on.

After about ten minutes of uncomfortable silence, Mike finally finished the last scratch off. "Another loser," he grumbled, flicking it across the room. He flopped back on the couch, putting one arm around the back behind my shoulders. I immediately sat forward.

"Hey Pops!" he shouted. I winced. There was that lovely timbre I'd grown to enjoy… not. "Bring me my lotion, will ya?"

"You gonna rub one out right in front of her?" shouted his dad from the other room.

"You should let her do it, or is that why you want the lotion?"

Yep. I'm getting the hell out of here. I don't even care how high that window is.

Mike leered at me for a split second, actually seeing that I was not amused. "No, my hands are dry."

"If you're not gonna eat those Friday's hot wings you got we're gonna eat them."

"I'm gonna eat them, dammit, those are mine."

"You don't want to put lotion on if you're gonna eat hot wings."

_Or if you're going to "rub one out"_ I thought. _You don't want spice on your junk. That shit will burn. _I snickered to myself at the thought of Mike's junk in pain. Not so much the junk, mostly the pain. I was in pain enough as it was, it seemed only fair that I got to spread the wealth.

I watched the digital clock under the TV that slowly, oh so slowly, flashed the advancement of time. Every now and then Mike would head into the kitchen and come back with beer or something for him to munch on.

We kept conversation to a minimum while watching several different sporting events on the television, though he did show me how quick he was with the remote. Winner? I think not.

"Sometimes, when dad wants to watch something, I'll switch the guide really quickly like this or change the date. Ya know, he doesn't know because he doesn't pick up and read the date on the bottom," he explained with much enthusiasm, and a little bit of me wanted to cry for the failure he really was, but a whole much larger bit of me wanted to just get the fuck out and away from this shit hole.

When the clock finally hit 8:50, I had never been happier to receive a text message from Emily in my entire life.

_You all set? Do I really need to falsify an emergency in ten minutes? – Em_

While Mike was otherwise engaged with rubbing his hand lotion into his skin, I typed back a response that let her off the call at 9:00 and told her I'd call her later and explain this horrid night.

As the program we were watching, started to wrap up, I began the 'stretch and yawn' routine to make my exit more believable and not a succeeded attempt at escaping.

"Wow, look at the time! I'm exhausted Mike, I think I'm going to head out. I have to work early tomorrow, you know? Long day!" I grinned as I stood up and began putting on my jacket.

"Hey wait a minute, I need to show you something before you go." He told me as he started towards a bookshelf full of…. oh fucking Christ… you've got to be kidding me, a whole fucking bookshelf of photo albums?

I spent an unwanted half hour enduring pictures from Mike's youth. He especially loved pointing out that he was rather well endowed in the testicle region as a baby, in every single nude bathing photo there was.

We finished the photo albums and I explained, hopefully somewhat convincingly, that even though I really hated it, I had to get going.

"Yeah, come on, I'll walk you out."

"Uh, thanks." A seemingly polite Mike, could it be?

I quickly ducked into the room I dubbed the 'Bitch Den', and said my thanks for having me over, and telling them it was nice to meet them and to have a good one before Mike led me towards the front door and out onto the porch.

"Well this has been good. Really good."

"Um, yeah, totally," I lied, and I honestly didn't care if he caught me.

"Alright well this is it," he told me before he swooped in for the most defiling and detrimental hug of my life.

"Okay, see you around," I told him as I started down the porch steps on my own, towards my car. _Way to walk to me to my car, douche._

"What are you talking about?" He called across the short distance between us. "I'll see you maybe later this weekend."

"Yeah, Mike, I'll see you around," I told him again, as I continued my walk, now nearly sprinting to my car before climbing in and thanking God I had decided to drive.


End file.
